Category: Throwback Thursday

I got very lucky with my very first videogame job. I was hired straight out of school by a small company called ICE Multimedia that was located in Ste-Adele, north of Montreal. I worked on 8 kids games that got published while I was there and 4 more that got canned. I had no 2D art education, having just finished a diploma in 3D art. I had to teach myself animation and a lot more. Here are a few samples of work I did there. Those were team work, so I picked screens where I did a significant amount of work, but bits and bobs were done by other people. These were all done between 2000 and 2002.

The solar system screen in Land f the Magic Stones 2.

Music making screen in Adiboo presents: Drawing

The drawing activity from Adiboo presents: Cooking I worked on the background, the design and animation of the characters and some interface stuff.

Like this:

In 2003, I worked for a very small company called Fugitive Interactive on their first game. When I started working there, there was an artist and two programmers and no design doc. All we knew what that we were working on a beach volleyball game on Pocket PC (yep, it’s that old.) Back then I had just two and half years experience in the gaming industry, but that was still more than all the others together (who had a total of 0 years of experience.)

So I started to create an art bible, wrote the specs and documentation, tried to manage the staff. It wasn’t easy and we had to let the artist go because he wanted to work on paper and have me scan everything. Imagine my surprise when I got started and he gave me the animations as a stack on index cards. Oh, and he refused to do anything other than manga style. In the end, I did all the art myself, we had to change programmers a few times but the game came out. We even worked on another game after that.

So for this Throwback Thursday, here are a few screenshots from the game that I put in my portfolio after that. I’m a bit embarrassed by them today, but it could have been worse.

In the 90’s, I was really into colored ink. It was almost all I did. I used Ecoline on watercolor paper, and later on illustration board. This is probably the best piece I have left from that time. It’s from 1997. The colors suffered a bit from the scanning, but I think it’s fair to say that Ecoline doesn’t suffer from the washed out colors problem that plagues watercolorists.

Like this:

Many years ago, I wanted to make mobile games. Now I am not a programmer but I had been in the industry for some years. We thought we’d start small and make a tiny avatar maker, since it was something that was part of bigger games at the time. You’d play a PS2 game and make yourself an avatar from different pieces and use that. Since the ability to associate a picture to a phone number was starting to be available on phones, but cameras were not yet in the picture (heh) we wanted people to be able to make composite funny portraits of their friends. Turns out that the selling and porting back then was much more complicated than today, you had to go through phone companies so that project was short lived. But all the tiny tiny art was made and I still think it’s hilarious.